Author: kaitpack

I still remember what I ordered in the pub on Sunday afternoon a few kilometers from campus when he told me who he voted for. I’d known him for years and never pegged him for it. Never assumed that we would vote for the same party when he was so different from me. 

But we shared Yorkshire pudding and sat together for hours, talking about literature and all the books we don’t have in common. 

Goes to show people are people–not their political affiliations. 

And I remember when she showed up at my door after he died and sat on the front porch with me. Or when she sent me that care package right after my first breakup. And we don’t see eye to eye on some major headlines. 

But I’d die for them. Or sit on the kitchen floor with them. Or on their couch in their living room after their baby goes to heaven. 

I scroll through stories of people calling other people “idiots”. And then I turn off my phone for a few hours. I don’t answer calls. 

Because pride divides. Alienates. Dehumanizes. 

But there’s one weekend in August when we laugh and hike and jump off cliffs and she never mentions it at all–the one thing that everyone has been talking about all year. Not once. 

It doesn’t register until later that it’s the first weekend where the biggest issue of the year was not an issue for us. “It’s none of my business,” she tells me later. 

Sometimes I scroll through the comment section of the New York Times. It has become the business of everyone to care about everyone else’s business. 

And there are reasons to care and to be informed. 

And there are reasons to go hiking on a Sunday morning–far away from cell service. “The reason I love hiking is because everyone can’t look at their phones for hours,” I tell him. 

And as we climb the snow-covered trail under the warm sun, I wonder if heaven has wilderness. I wonder if we wander for days in wild places with our Lord. And I wonder if it’s something like this day when time doesn’t matter.

Because time doesn’t matter to Him. He is in the future and in the past. He is where people are deciding to vote for someone who won’t be born for years and He is at the end of our time.

And He is here with me as I pray about how to live.

He is: I AM. 

“I want all this to be over,” I tell her. But I know it will not be over for me for a long time. 

But it is for Him. 

It is seen, lived, completed for Him. From the Messiah on the cross to the King of Kings on the white horse, it is finished. 

And it’s our business to live like it. 

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.” Revelation 1:8

“People just give up,” he tells me at the age of 90 from his room at the senior’s home. “But you have to dream.” Everyone needs a bucket list, he says. 

We talk about ours. I’d like to go to Turkey and he’d like to go back. I’d like to take a road trip across New Zealand and he’d like to take another cruise through the Panama Canal. 

“I don’t need a big dream,” she tells me. Instead, she asks me to pray for purpose in her life. 

On a Wednesday afternoon, I find myself planning my next big hike. It was my dream to be out in the mountains every weekend. I asked for it, moved across the country for it. And now I feel guilty when I want to sleep in. Some Saturdays, it feels more like a burden than a break. 

She tells us she’s been thinking of that verse for the weary and heavy laden. She tells us that Jesus is our rest. 

Because even small dreams, ripe with expectation, can hold you back. Burden you. Weigh you down. Overpower your ability to live with purpose. 

“I’ve always wanted to be a writer,” I remember telling them in a job interview. And I wake up five years later and can barely keep my eyes on that blinking cursor in Word for more than a minute at a time. 

The honeymoon stage has worn off. 

“There are days,” he says, “when we aren’t at our best. But there’s never a day I don’t want to come home to her.” That was what he told me of love long past the honeymoon stage.

Because love lasts–long past. 

Past the point when dreams have lost their charm, been stripped of ego and misdirected passion. Pared down to the bare minimum. 

Love lasts. 

I ask myself more and more frequently what I really need to accomplish in this life to truly feel I’ve made the most of my time here. I ask on late nights when I can’t stop working. I ask as I scroll through flights and sales like an addict. 

I ask like a lawyer once asked Jesus. When He really should’ve known the greatest commandment by His life, His miracles, His compassion, His death and His resurrection. 

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind,” He answered. “Love your neighbour as yourself.” (Matthew 22:37,39)

And I call him weekly and we talk about our bucket list.

But really I just call to talk to him. Because I love him. And even if we never do the things we plan to do, I’ve loved him. 

Even if I never do the things I’ve dreamed to do, I’ve loved Him. 

And that will be enough for this life.

And more than enough for the next. 

“For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” (Philippians 1:21)

I’m still a kid when I ask him how his sister became a best-selling author. “She writes a little every day,” he says. 

And so, I write a little every week. 

I tell her I want to write a novel, but she knows I’m a creature of habit. “You don’t want to commit because when you do, you’ll actually have to do it.” 

I don’t commit. Yet. 

Shortly after the world shuts down and people buy too much toilet paper, I talk about it again with a fellow writer over Facetime. 

“I’m going to write a novel,” I tell her. “A little every day.” 

As soon as I say it, I want to take it back. It sounds like a death sentence. It sounds like a commitment to imperfection. 

And then it’s mid summer of 2020 and I sit on the grass with my friends as a member of the orchestra plays the piano. He’s traveled the world, but here we are together, picking ants off our legs and nodding to Chopin. 

One of the reasons I know everything will be okay is the way humans never stop creating. Never stop laying down their ego at the possibility of picking the wrong notes, the wrong words, the wrong samples.

“You have to be okay with failing,” he often tells me. 

And so, I keep writing. A little every day. 

“Art is essential,” she says. We talk about it all the way down the mountain above Canmore. “It’s like an advertisement.” You look at it and it’s asking you what you think, feel–and what you should do about it. 

It’s a relationship: creator to beholder. We look up at the mountain we just climbed and I want to shout: beholder to Creator. 

But most days, writing doesn’t feel like a relationship. It doesn’t feel holy. It feels solitary.

It feels like sitting in the witness stand. Tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And you do it. You show up scared and write a little every day. 

Some days, writing is like being in the infantry. You stare at the blinking cursor and fight for creativity. You do it scared, a little every day.

Like you show up to a first date, a second and a third. One step at a time. 

You go to the funeral. You talk about her memories. You take out her old photos. One stage of grief at a time. 

When I finally finish my novel a year and a half after we talk over Facetime, I sit back in my desk chair and stare at the screen for a few minutes. 

I’ve imagined what I would do to celebrate, many times. Instead, I go for a run as I do every day. I make dinner. Buy groceries. 

Small things. Faithful things. Habits of endurance.

Stamina to break through the finish line. 

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.” Hebrews 12:1

I share moments with different people now. New people. And the more I share with them, the more I discover.

“You bring out the weird in me,” she says. “And I bring out the weird in you.” I thought at 27, I had myself figured out. But then you meet someone new and there’s another piece of yourself you didn’t see before. 

There’s a piece of Him you didn’t see before. 

I get in my head when I catch my reflection in his sunglasses because I wonder if what I see is the way he’s seeing me. Usually, he lets me leave my overthinking at the door. I’ve never seen myself live in the moment before–not like this. Not the jump-off-moving trains kind of living. 

“I haven’t blogged as much since I met you,” I say. The truth is all the new relationships are already too much exposure. Too much vulnerability. 

I travel back to my childhood home for eight days and it feels like we’re all teenagers again, but I start to notice differences about them. They’ve met different people. They’ve lived different lives. 

“We have to expect the people in our lives to change,” she says as we sit cross-legged on the grass on a Tuesday night. She says it like it’s the secret to long-term friendship and lifelong love.

And long-lasting faith. Faith that goes in the hall of fame. Faith is the conviction that the gospel brings change.

And perhaps the best advice I received this year is to be curious. 

To start conversations with curiosity.

To get on the phone with my family members. 

To handle confrontation.

I open the page in the Bible and read the passage that makes my cheeks burn and my tongue get dry. 

Curiosity is admitting that there is always something you might not know. It’s the secret passage to humility. 

“The love I have for my nephew is something I never imagined I’d experience,” she tells me. 

And that gives me hope that there’s other love we haven’t experienced yet. There’s joy we haven’t known. There’s growth we haven’t felt. There’s beauty we haven’t seen.

But we will one day, perhaps–if we’re only curious enough to keep our eyes open for it. 

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Hebrews 11:1

I watch the leftover sunshine leave its mark in the sky behind the wings of the plane—and wish I could just leave without any ache. 

I wish I didn’t wish to see him every minute of the day. And I wish I didn’t miss his tiny hand holding my thumb. 

The more people I love, the more I’m terrified that I do. 

I find things in my apartment to throw out, give away because I’d like to need nothing. Only the essentials. 

If you possess nothing, you can’t lose as much. 

“I bet he told you to go to emerg and you didn’t want to listen because you want to do everything yourself.” He looks me in the eye. He’s known me far too long, too well. Pushed his way back in when I was stand-offish. 

I see her as I scroll through memes and other people’s memories, her post on self-reliance. Independence. It’s highly praised. Another friend tells me she has trouble being independent. 

But independence is my crutch.

Because it’s much easier to push away than to lean in close. It’s easier to sit alone than to lean my head on his shoulder. It’s easier to delete a text than to send one. To listen than to share. To know others than to be known. 

When she tells me she loves me, I know it’s deliberate. And difficult to admit. 

Like it must have been difficult when He deliberately made Himself nothing. 

When He said “not my will but yours” to give us something better. 

“How do you know if you love someone?” I ask him way past midnight on a Saturday night, sitting in the corner of the kitchen like old times. 

What he says makes me cry quietly in the bathroom later, trying to push fear back. 

Fear keeps me selfish, closed off. Self protective. 

I ask her to pray that I’d have deeper intimacy with God. Perfect love casts out fear, but I am perfectly afraid to love Him. Afraid of the cost. 

Afraid of dependence. 

“Even resting in Him feels like work to me,” I tell the group. Apathy is easier. 

I watch the leftover sunshine leave its mark in my rearview mirror on the drive home–and want to be brave enough to leave with the ache, to lean into loving Him.

I text them when I get home with the little bit of courage I have because dependence is only for those brave enough to choose it. 

I tell them I want Him. I need Him. 

And with dependence comes something better. 

Love without fear. 

“We love because he first loved us.” 1 John 4:19

“There’s nothing new, so don’t ask,” she laughs. 

Sometimes life is just getting up, starting work, eating dinner, going to bed. And doing it again.

Weeks pass, filled with insignificant moments. I don’t bother to write about them. 

Months pass of the mundane Monday to Friday hum-drum. 

Life is painfully ordinary. 

Until it’s not. 

Until it’s just painful. 

Until I’m standing in the kitchen without motivation to do anything, say anything. All I can think about is how this piece of writing will break his family’s heart.

Until I’m sitting right where I got her text that he’s gone. I just met him two weeks before and now I’ll never see him again.

I move to a city near the mountains and they tell me they can’t believe I’ve never heard about Chinooks. They can’t believe I’ve never felt the warm sun after the great winds blow down the Rockies into the flat prairie lands below. 

A break in the winter. A taste of warmer weather. 

“I think we can trust God,” I tell her in the middle of the worst day of her month. “If He’s God, things are not as they appear to us always.” 

What seems worldwide only has a twenty mile radius. 

The winter winds rage, but the Chinook winds still come. 

The clouds break. 

Pain turns into a dull ache. 

And fear grows grey, is forgotten. 

“Let’s do this day everyday,” he says of our lazy Sunday afternoon, fishing by the river. 

Of course, we can’t. 

But we will today. We’ll let this day be what it is. A break in the storm. A pause to the winter. 

The sun, an electric charge of courage. 

Until it’s not. 

Until I’m standing in the kitchen without motivation to do anything.

Except to remember this ordinary day, fishing by the river.

And how they always come around again.

Maybe with older connections, wiser eyes. Lonely hearts. Shaking hands. 

But the great winds come around again. 

And the sun shines above the storm clouds. 

And God is at work–far beyond. 

God is. 

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9       

“It is hard to feel like you belong in the world sometimes,” she tells me. 

We’re both missing home–or what we think of when we think of home. The house where we grew up. The entire family, sitting around the dinner table.

We know that if we do go home, it won’t be the way we remember it. Family members will be missing. Sisters will have to leave earlier than usual to put the kids to bed. The lights will be brighter, more energy efficient. Not the soft, warm yellow lights we remember as children.

But I still call Mom on a Friday night, just to be sure of home. Just to be sure there is still a place where I am known at my worst and loved. 

Where I don’t need to explain myself. 

Like he tries to explain to me how he spent the afternoon at their graves and I wonder what it’s like to lose two women you love in one lifetime. 

Like she tries to explain how she’s navigating the loneliness of a new relationship, how the deepest connections you have can amplify the disconnection you can’t express.

I remember when she was my roommate, hearing her slip out of our room before sunrise and watching her walk the flat field outside our window. A lone shadow against the rising red sun sun. 

Sometimes there are things that only God can guide us through. 

I knew her, and Who she walked with every morning in the field outside our window. They were conversations she could never share with me, as close as we were.

On a Sunday morning, he talks about Peter, his failure. Three times over. The loneliness of that. 

I have my own failures. Three times over that Sunday. 

“And the Lord turned and looked at Peter. And Peter remembered the saying of the Lord, how he had said to him, ‘Before the rooster crows today, you will deny me three times.’” Luke 22:61

The Lord looked right at him. 

That’s what I think about as I sit alone on my couch on a Sunday night. 

The Lord looks right at me. 

For Peter, it was painful to be seen on the path of denial. 

For her, it’s the path of homesickness.

For him, it’s grief. 

Sometimes it’s terrifying. Sometimes, strengthening. 

But all the time, He sees us there. 

“Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!” Psalm 139: 7-8

There are moments you remember as significant–as if you’re on the brink of something.

Like when I sat in my carseat in the back and prayed for real for the first time. 

And when I first stepped in her office door, declaring I’d be as honest as possible. 

Or in the backseat of a rental car in Iceland when it clicked that God still loved me even though I needed help. 

And last year, when I lay on the grass and watched the sunlight peek through the leaves overhead, listening to the same song over and over and over. My Defender. 

Like a war cry. 

And it was as clear as a Sunday morning in May.

“You said it’s stuck with you–God as Defender?” We’re climbing mountains on a Saturday when she asks me about it. 

It makes me think of the old log cabin in the bush at the back of the farm, the door torn off its hinges. You’d have to check the doorframe as you stepped inside to make sure no dead coons were going to fall from the rafters and land on your head. 

Dilapidated. 

“What blows my mind is that He defends me.” I tell her when we’re halfway up the mountain. “I’d get it if He were defending something beautiful.”

It makes me think of the castle we ran through as kids. I remember the crisp dining room, set up as if the people who lived there hadn’t died a hundred years ago. The ropes protecting it from tourists like us. 

Stately.

“Whenever I wake in the morning, the one thing I’m always sure of is you,” he tells me on a Tuesday evening. There’s nothing I could do that would make him love me less, he says. The feeling of his words gets in my throat. 

Like it gets in my throat when I lie on the grass and listen to the same song over and over and over. My Defender. 

Because I’m the dilapidated cabin.

But He goes to war for me. 

Not because my hinges are intact and my rooms are stately. But because He is Lord of the cobwebs too. 

And I belong to Him.

“To love is to be vulnerable,” she says. 

I feel it in my bones. In between the lines of arguments in the family group chat. 

I feel it when I visit her in the retirement residence and she grabs my hand.

I feel it, the older he gets and the more I call him, depend on him. Get used to his stories.

When I text him first. 

When I say “I miss you.” 

We were eleven when I told her every single secret I had. 

And then I turn fifteen and I’m hiding in the backseat of my parent’s car as she walks home, without me. 

And ten years later, he breaks up with me in the corner of the cafe. And I tell her I’d rather not date again.

If I’m not careful, I hide vulnerability in the bottom drawer like the summer’s worn-out clothes. 

And I’m twenty-seven, standing in the church at half-past eleven when I think about Him hanging on the cross in His bare skin. 

The most vulnerable act. 

“I feel myself allowing the distance to grow between us,” I tell her. Like a good friend, she tells me to soften. To reach out. 

Because what if He didn’t? 

And perhaps the reason I’m struggling to be vulnerable is because I am avoiding the act of worship more often than I should. 

Because that’s easier. Easier not to relinquish control. Not to acknowledge my need for Him. Not to hold my plans with open hands. 

But if you don’t live with open hands, it’s hard to live with open arms. Open heart. 

“Love is the antidote to fear,” she texts the three of us on a Wednesday morning.

And I’m twenty-seven, standing in the church at half-past eleven when I think about Him hanging on the cross in His bare skin.

A vulnerability so terrifying that Fear cannot bear the sight of it. 

A love so bold that Fear trembles in the face of it. 

Fear of loss. Fear of rejection. 

Cowering in the bold face of vulnerability. Of Perfect Love. 

And that’s the image I have in my mind when she calls me on a Friday night and tells me we might as well talk it out.

Because we’re choosing a new way.

A vulnerable way.

The way of the cross.

“We love because he first loved us.” 1 John 4:19

I remember Dad sitting on the front porch, watching the rain blow across the fields during that first storm after the tornado. I wanted to join him, but the thunder was loud and the wind was relentless against the tarp that was covering what was left of the dining room. 

And I was secretly terrified. 

Like I’m too scared to call her and tell her the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I rehearse it in my head. I write it down. And three months pass. 

But my desire for comfort wittles at the edges of a friendship. “I should’ve talked to you earlier,” I finally tell her.

And I know there are other people I need to call. There are storms I need to face.

But I’ll choose a beat-up house over his safe company on the front porch if it means I can stay dry. 

It’s almost imperceptible the way I stop caring. When she texts me to pray, I try to pray with as little passion and feeling as possible. 

To avoid emotion during the motions of caring.

“The last time I surrendered everything to the Lord, He answered me.” She tells me with hope in her eyes, but I see it as a cautionary tale. 

He answers.

My fear is not a reflection of Him, but my ability to trust Him. 

Like my neglect to call her is not a reflection of our friendship, but my ability to trust it. 

I remember it clearly, him sitting on the front porch. It was the way he faced the storm. “Not without risk,” he tells me, years later. It’s still his motto after two natural disasters take the roofs off his properties. 

All worthwhile things are risky.

And I remember this when he picks me up for dinner. 

When I take a deep breath and call her back. 

When I pray without caution. 

“And he answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.’” Luke 10:27